Quote Originally Posted by Airget View Post
What amuses me about all this Teleportation talk/change is people are seriously asking for a time sink when getting to events. They don't want traveling to be as easy but by doing that you are pretty much adding 10-15 time sinks based on where you go in a wide variety so you are pretty much saying "Please SE give us a time sink which will add up to hundreds of hours of "gameplay" over the years"
I think you are looking at this from the wrong direction. Look at it from a game design perspective. If you need X event to take Y amount of time to complete, you can do that in a few ways but to vastly oversimplify it let's boil it down to two: it can take no time to get there and then take Y amount of time to complete, or it can take time to get there and take A + B = Y amount of time.

I can guarantee you that many developers would not see travel time as "extra play time added on" but "part of the time it takes to do the event". Balancing an MMO takes a very holistic approach. There are pros and cons to each approach to travel time.

Instant Travel:
Fast - obviously, players can get in and start content immediately with very little pickup time.
Isolated - I would call this the major drawback of instant travel, events become isolated in on themselves, with no context to set them in. As a side effect, the world seems to shrink in the eyes of the player the faster they can get around it.

"Slow" Travel:
Expansive - In contract to instant travel, "slow" travel sets the tone of each event by placing it in a context.
Intra-event Variety - Okay, variety isn't quite right, but when traveling is required to take part in an event, it becomes, in and of itself, part of the event. The event then takes on two very distinct and varied parts, the journey, and the destination.
Slow - I have added a few more blues than reds on "slow" travel, but this is a pretty serious red. Slow travel restricts events two catagories, those who have enough free time to enjoy them, and events that are brief enough to cater to those who have time to travel to them and take part in them.

For myself, I have debated this long and hard, and the conclusion I have come to is that the life-blood of an MMO is the world itself. We see this in games like WoW and FFXI, Eve and Everquest. Games that may not all have had massive populations (WoW aside) but they all have lived long, stable lives. Those long lives are built on top of the strong foundation of a World. WoW and FFXI had decades of lore to pull from, Eve and Everquest both had rich, interesting worlds.

Taking away the player's reason to live in the world that they are playing in is tantamount to suicide. Yes, you will alienate your casual players, catering to both for any long period of time is going to be neigh on impossible; but in order to really pull people into the world, instead of inviting them to play on top of it, they are going to need to stop apologizing for their own massive world and start taking pride in it.